Life [13]
And I broke down.
“He’s coming here in fifteen minutes. He’ll be here any minute now to take you away into the home.”
And I shat myself. I was about six or seven.
“Oh, Mum!” I’m on my knees, I’m pleading and begging.
“I’ve had it up to here with you. I don’t want you anymore.”
“No, Mum, please…”
“And on top of that, I’m going to tell your dad.”
“Oh, Muuuuuum.”
That was a cruel day. She was relentless. She kept it going for about an hour too. Until I cried myself to sleep and realized eventually that there was no man at all and that she had been putting me on. And I had to figure out why. I mean, a few rotten tomatoes? I guess I needed a lesson: “You don’t do that around here.” Doris was never strict. It was just “This is the way it is, this is what’s going to happen and you’re going to do this and do that.” But that’s the only time she put the fear of God into me.
Not that we ever had the fear of God in our family. There’s nobody in my family that ever had anything to do with organized religion. None of them. I had a grandfather who was a red-blooded socialist, as was my grandmother. And the church, organized religion, was something to be avoided. Nobody minded what Christ said, nobody said there wasn’t a God or anything like that, but stay away from organizations. Priests would be considered with much suspicion. See a bloke in a black frock, cross the road. Mind out for the Catholics, they’re even dodgier. They had no time for it. Thank God, otherwise Sundays would have been even more boring than they were. We never went to church, never even knew where it was.
I went down to Dartford with my wife, Patti, who had never been there, and my daughter Angela, who was our guide, being a native of the place and brought up, like me, by Doris. And while we were standing there in Chastilian Road, out of the next-door shop, a unisex hairdresser’s called Hi-Lites that only had room for about three customers, came what seemed like fifteen young female assistants of an age and type I recognized. It would have been nice if it had been there when I was there. Unisex salon. I wonder what the greengrocer would have had to say about that?
In the next minutes or so, the dialogue went along these familiar lines.
Fan: Can we have your autograph, please? It’s to Anne and all the girls at Hi-Lites. Come into the hairdresser’s, have your hair cut. Are you going to Denver Road where Mick lived?
KR: That’s the next one up, right?
Fan: And I want you to sign one to my husband.
KR: Oh, you married? Oh, shit.
Fan: Why you asking? Come into our salon.… Got to get a piece of paper. My husband’s not going to believe this.
KR: I’d forgotten what it was like to be mobbed by Dartford girls.
Older Fan: These are all too young to appreciate it. We remember you.
KR: Well, I’m still going. Whatever you’re listening to now, they wouldn’t have been there without me. I’m going to have dreams about this place tonight.
Fan: Did you ever imagine, in that little room?
KR: I imagined everything. I never thought it would happen.
There was something intrinsically Dartford about those girls. They’re at ease, they hang together. They’re almost like village girls—in the sense that they belong to one small place. Still, they give that feeling of closeness and friendliness. I used to have a few girlfriends in Chastilian Road days, though it was purely platonic at the time. I always remember one gave me a kiss. We were about six or seven. “But keep it dark,” she said. I still haven’t written that song. Chicks are always miles ahead. Keep it dark! That was the first girlfriend thing, but I was mates with a lot of girls as I grew up. My cousin Kay and I, we were friends for quite a few years. Patti and Angela and I drove past Heather Drive, near the heath. Heather Drive was really upscale. This is where Deborah lived. I got this incredible fixation on her when I was eleven or twelve. I used to stand there looking at her bedroom window, like a thief in the night.
The heath was only a five-minute bike ride away. Dartford’s not a big place, and you